The word “pirate” often conjures images of swashbuckling adventures by hook-handed men in search of buried treasure — but the 21st century has seen a new breed of pirate arise: average people devaluing media through illegal digital reproduction.
As innocuous as it may seem, this does immense damage.
The temptation is warranted; after all, who doesn’t want free entertainment? It’s only natural to want to obtain something through the easiest means possible, but we must think of the strain pirating these works has on the creatives who painstakingly put them together.
Piracy’s effects are everywhere — especially amid our current pandemic, wherein lockdown has led to ample free time on everyone’s hands.
Film and television are the mediums pirates tend to exploit most prevalently. Sites with generic-enough names like “watchmovies.com” are host to illegal torrents of countless releases, new and old, costing these industries nearly $30 billion each year.
With the price of movie tickets rising each year — currently averaging at over $9 per ticket — it’s much easier to just stay home and find the same film online for free. The issue with this method, however, is that it’s ultimately disrespectful to artists and other industry workers.
Maybe you think, “well, it’s just me pirating it; others will go see it in theaters.” Sure, this idea is decent in theory — but flawed in its practice. The films piracy harms the most are not the $250 million epics that require the biggest screen possible, but the smaller independent films made by artisans of the craft.
However, the film industry is bound to survive rampant piracy, as there is an infrastructure in place to promote theater-going. But one artistic medium feels the plight unlike any other — the comic book.
Working in an already-underfunded industry, comic artists’ and writers’ livelihoods often hang by a thread, contingent on whether their books are actually bought and read through legal means.
The interest in comic book superheroes is at an all-time high with blockbusters like “Wonder Woman” and the Marvel Cinematic Universe making waves at the box office. Naturally, fans want to read more about where these stories come from.
There’s a general idea that one can just read scans of these comics online for free with no consequence to the art itself, but this is not remotely the case. The comic book industry is small already, with average sales of less than 100,000 units per issue, and series are regularly canceled due to low sales caused by illegal online scans.
The tragedy of a canceled comic is a tremendous loss to the artists who struggle to make a living in an industry largely driven by passion over monetary gain.
Despite the minute sales, experts estimate readers of pirated comics overshadow actual customers. Writer Jim Zub claims, “20 times as many people read comics illegally shared online, than pay for digital or physical works.” 
The creatives working on passion projects like independent films and comic books depend on sales. When their art gets pirated, it fails in the industry and those involved lose work.
It’s ironic: people who illegally seek entertainment through third-party sites often complain of an increasingly homogenized artistic landscape when they are in fact the arbiters of this change.
Next time you sit down to stream an illegal cam of “Tenet,” torrent a recording of the latest independent film from an up-and-coming director or read an illegally downloaded PDF of the newest issue of “Action Comics,” just remember: the artists who put their life into this work. Their wellbeing is beholden to you, the consumer, and your willingness to pay to enjoy their product.
Domenic Purdy is a 19-year-old journalism sophomore from Prairieville, Louisiana.